Alex McKechnie

about this book: At the heart of the book is the question: what will our deep future look like? We start by travelling back to the early moments of the universe and trying to discover just where complexity itself came from. We then journey thousands of years into the distant future to meet our distant descendants, and to find out just where that complexity has gone. Genetics, robotics, nanotechnology, and conscious artificial intelligence are just some of the bizarre technologies we'll examine along the way. These innovations are set not just to change the nature of our lives, but to change the nature of our species.

We will turn ourselves into unrecognisable shapes and configurations using these technologies; writing our consciousness onto machines, redesigning our bodies, backwards engineering our brains, and eventually going on to, as the book's title suggests, build a god. Just as spiders are irresistibly drawn to making webs, as beavers are to their dams, so is our species to building superintelligences. The entire history of technology appears to have been leading up to this one mammoth task. How to Build a God looks finally at what we can expect of this superintelligence, and what its creation means for the cosmos as a whole.